THE NEW YORKER costume, came to our house for a recep- tion. After he went back West, he sent Mr. Cooper an Indian buffalo robe as a present. The leather was beautifully tanned and on it the history of the Sioux had been painted in lines of sign pictures two inches high. For a while we chil- dren studied the pictures and tried to figure out what they meant, but finally we lost interest. Grandfather then put it in his gig for a lap robe, and used it until it wore out. What an interesting curiosity it would be now. W HEN I was a small boy, Mr. Cooper still took a very active in- terest in his glue business. Every morn- ing, even after the factory was in Brook- lyn, one of the men came to his house, bringing a record of the business done the day before. One morning he was very late. When he arrived he said that the ferries were not running because the East River was frozen over. He had walked across. I don't think it's ever been as cold again in New York. The great blizzard of '88 came along while I was a student at Princeton, but I happened to be home on the day it start- ed. Hoping to get back to college, I took a cab to the ferry, where I was told that no trains were running out of Jersey City, across the river, so I took the same cab home. The next day the snow on Lexington Avenue near our house was six to eight feet deep. Where the drifts were even higher, people had to tunnel along the sidewalks. There was a tunnel at the corner of Twenty-first Street and Lexington. I recall that a horse car was stalled not far away on Fourth Avenue. The horses had been unhitched and led away. All I could see was the sma!] smokestack of the car's stove projecting above the snow. Even the roof of the car was covered. When the sidewalks had been cleared enough for us to get ahout, I walked over to Broadway and up Fifth A venue. The shops had signs saying, "Will reopen when the flow- ers bloom in the spring." It took New York over a week to dig itself out and many people died of exposure or the cold. W HAT went on in the streets about Gramercy Park was very differ- ent in those days. Men drove great herds of Texas longhorn steers across Four- teenth Street from the docks on the North River, up Irving Place, around the park, and on to the slaughter houses on First Avenue. Often a steer went on a rampage and had to be lassoed or somehow cornered. I remember a par- tIcularly vicious one which the- drovers could not catch. A policeman shot sev- JS {-r>;' :i , ."J,- ,: -:........:.. .... ....... \,:: ,\:'<"'" .. .::. :".. . \ \ \, \. \'. '\" \. , " " '. ", , ""'" 69 .....; .......,.,.... ............ ..._ . ....................:;..... . .... -; =I.. - ;::> -V cry -v- . -11 . . JJ; øfl } ! Sf; ee t ..; þ,..-v øfl J? , ø